Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

Imaginary Crises

In any constructive agenda for the future, the gender feminist’s divisive social philosophy has no place. – Christina Hoff Sommers

One year ago today I published the first part of “Rough Trade”, which discussed the definition of rape, mentioned the hateful notion that a prostitute cannot be raped and described the first time I was raped on the job (the other incidents were described in the second part). Then a few weeks ago, I ran into this essay, “Researching the ‘Rape Culture’ of America” by Christina Hoff Sommers; it’s actually the tenth chapter of her 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? which I read while I was still a librarian, and while some parts of the essay seemed familiar when I read them a few weeks ago I put that down to its clearly being written around the same time as the book. I’m glad I reread it, though, because while doing so I was struck by the parallels between the rape hysteria of the early ‘90s she discusses in the essay and the “sex trafficking” hysteria I have discussed so often of late.

Sommers’ term for what I call “neofeminism” is “gender feminism”, i.e. anti-male, anti-sex radical feminism. She refers to its opposite as “equity feminism”, the sensible, pro-sex form of feminism which is concerned with legal equality rather than emasculating males and redesigning society; this form of feminism evolved into “third wave” feminism soon after the book was written. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use Sommers’ terms (which are also the ones used by Camille Paglia in her writing of that period) for the duration of this column. Readers over 30 will probably remember that the early ‘90s was the heyday of extremist feminism; after taking over mainstream feminism in the early ‘80s and silencing most of its critics within the movement by shame, “if you’re not for us you’re against us” rhetoric and arguments from a false concept of sisterhood, the “gender feminists” quickly established “women’s studies” departments and put a stranglehold on the government and foundation grants second-wave feminism had earned. Thus large, wealthy organizations were essentially tricked into funding neomarxist social-engineering schemes which indoctrinated an entire generation of young women into a hateful campaign against half the human race; even the Hitler Jugend was never so successful at brainwashing.

As with all hate movements, “gender feminism” needed to create a devil, a wholly imaginary or grotesquely exaggerated bogeyman on which to focus its efforts; for gender feminists that was “rape culture”. The second-wave myth that “rape is a crime of violence and not sex” was turned on its head by Dworkin, MacKinnon and others of their ilk; yes, they said, rape is a crime of violence but for men sex is violence. Girls were taught that all men are “potential rapists” and all women “potential [rape] survivors”, but unfortunately for their agenda the facts simply didn’t support that; the FBI reported that 8% of all American women would suffer an attempted rape at some point in their lifetimes, and since only about a third of all attempted rapes are completed that just wasn’t enough to create the necessary hysteria. The “gender feminists” therefore broadened the definition of “rape” to include any and all sex the woman herself did not initiate (even if it did not involve penetration or the woman did not consider it rape). In 1982 Mary Koss of Kent State used this new, broadened definition to design a questionnaire she gave to 3000 coeds, and concluded that 15.4% of respondents had been raped and 12.1% were victims of attempted rape. But that wasn’t the way the women saw it; only 27% of those she called “rape victims” agreed that they had indeed been raped, while 49% said the incidents were the result of “miscommunication,” 14% called it “a crime but not rape,” and 11% said they were not victimized at all. In true neofeminist fashion Koss ignored the women’s views of their own experiences and characterized their denial that they were raped (and the fact that 42% of them later voluntarily had sex with their “rapists”) as evidence that they were “confused and sexually naïve” rather than that her theory was wrong.

Mary Koss and Dean Kilpatrick

Koss’ results were published in Ms. magazine in 1985 and quickly became gospel; the “rape” and “attempted rape” figures together added up to 27.5%, a fraction quickly abbreviated to “one in four” and endlessly repeated in pamphlets, articles, “rape prevention” and “sensitivity” classes and protest marches. Joe Biden (at that time a mere senator) cited it repeatedly, and of course almost nobody in the media questioned it despite the fact that every criminologist and sexologist in the country knew that it was much too high. Then in 1990 the “National Women’s Study” by Dean Kilpatrick announced that about 13% (one in eight) adult American women had been victims of a completed, forcible rape, a number derived in part by defining an unwanted finger being inserted into the vagina during heavy petting as “rape”. A Harris Poll conducted soon afterward found the actual number of women who said they had been raped to be 2%; guess which number got repeated? The only people who made the effort to debunk these inflated numbers were Neil Gilbert of Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare and a pair of investigative reporters from the Toledo Blade; they pointed out the serious flaws in Koss’ and Kilpatrick’s studies, the conflict with other studies and the discounting of the experiences of the women themselves. The Blade article also pointed out that while the rape rate on university campuses was about 1/30 the rate in poor urban neighborhoods, millions of dollars were flowing to “rape prevention” programs and “rape crisis centers” on campuses (Biden’s “Violence Against Women Act” added a further $20 million) while most cities got nothing and “rape crisis” hotlines, where they exist, often go straight to police sex crimes units rather than to counselors.

But of course it was no use; the Gilbert and Blade critiques were welcomed by scholars and reasonable people but ignored by the fanatics and reviled by “gender feminists” with a vested interest in promoting the big numbers which would draw the big money. Both the Blade reporters and Professor Gilbert were accused of “promoting rape” and “hating women”, and protesters publicly called for their deaths or wished for them to be raped. This should, of course, all sound familiar; the “studies” designed to produce desired results, the grossly-inflated figures, the further distortion of the already-flawed figures by fanatics, the endless repetition of the bogus numbers by politicians and lazy reporters alike, the dismissal of the experiences of those touted as “victims”, the unconstitutionally-broad, civil rights-trampling laws spawned by the hysteria, the vilification of anyone who tries to tell the truth and the NGOs slurping up millions while the actual victims are ignored are all as characteristic of trafficking fanaticism as they were of rape fanaticism. The timeliness of this 17-year-old article is proof that, unfortunately, some things never change.

55 Responses

Ah, the early 90’s. So *much* fun being a college student on a PC campus.

The one thing about all this anti-sex brainwashing in the 90’s was that, in my opinion, it didn’t work very well. Brainwashing is not very effective generally because the human mind is rather mushy. And this particular brainwashing ran so strongly against our very nature that even women who bought it hook, line and sinker eventually outgrew it (in the end, that reptile part of our brain will have its way, whether we like it or not).

I remember a successful “deprogramming” session with a friend who found her boyfriend was looking at porn and freaked out. She eventually realized it was just fantasy and a way for him to look at other women without cheating on her. Now she looks back on, say, the student protest against a Hooters (!) as “silly”.

Possibly off-topic question: what is your opinion of the “rape shield” laws that were passed around that same time?

There are two kinds of “rape shield” laws; in my opinion one kind is good and the other bad. The sort which prohibits too many questions about past sexual behavior makes sense because voluntary sexual activity of a rape complainant is no more germane to the case than are charitable donations made by a victim of theft.

The other sort, however, which hides the identities of rape victims, is bad public policy for several reasons. First, it perpetuates the stigma surrounding female sexuality by pretending that because the crime is sexual it is therefore shameful. Such laws also unfairly expose the accused to public scrutiny but not the accuser, which flies in the face of the common law tradition and makes it easier to make false allegations due to the lack of public censure for doing so.

I went to college in the early 90s, and I remember being profoundly irritated with Paglia and Sommers’ pandering to to the right-wing. Sommers continues to pander to the right today, which is why I can’t bring myself to admire her at all.

Perhaps the pandering came/comes from being ignored or reviled on the Left, but it is/was a big turn-off to me.

Would you not agree that most neo-feminists are on the “left” side of the political spectrum? In that case – any “rebellions” from that opinion would naturally be seen by many as “panderings to the right” – however, that doesn’t mean they weren’t spot on in their analysis at the time.

And I would also say – where do you think Libertarians fall – right or left? I don’t think they fall on the left since that is the home of centralized control of society. Sure, Libertarians don’t share many of the Social Conservative views that are on the right – but SoCons don’t comprise the entire right wing.

Libertarians fall on the side of individual rights, which is on the opposite end of the scale from partisans who typically identify as on the “right” or “left” side. It’s kind of like distracting a kid who just broke their arm by reminding them they get to pick the color of their cast. Red or blue, you’ve still got a broken arm.

Thank you, Alicia, exactly! The ridiculous and artificial “left” and “right” nonsense is one of the main impediments to fixing what’s wrong with the American political system. If I’m being raped by cops, I honestly can’t see what difference the color of their uniforms makes. Tyranny over the individual is tyranny, no matter what excuse the tyrants make for inflicting it.

Libertarians are on the Right, I’m afraid. While I do believe that individual libertarians like Maggie are for individual rights and freedoms, the real purpose of libertarianism is to take what is now currently public property and make it private, and to take public institutions and make them private instead.

For instance, they want to eliminate public schooling and make it private. They want to eliminate public parks and turn the property over to private ownership. And needless to say, they want to eliminate social programs like food benefits and social security.

Of course, all of these ideas are unpopular with the majority of people in the US, so libertarians focus on the sexy ideas and concerns like gun ownership and decriminalization of prostitution and drug legalization when talking in public and when trying to get people to support them. And I happen to support all three of these movements myself.

But I don’t support transferring public institutions into private hands, and if the majority of people were aware of this goal of libertarians, they’d drop it like a hot potato.

Case in point: those fine, upstanding libertarians called the Koch Brothers got caught with their proverbial pants down when they tried to gain control of Wisconsin state assets (google “koch brothers” and “governor scott walker” together to see what I’m referring to). Another case in point: the fine upstanding libertarian Rand Paul suggested that private businesses have the right to refuse to service to people based on the color of their skin (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/05/19/rachel_maddow_demolishes_rand_paul)

So in essence, libertarianism sounds great until you read the fine print.

Susan, the mistake you’re making is classifying “libertarianism” as a political party like “Republicans” or “Democrats”, which 95% of us aren’t. So there is considerable variation on what individual libertarians support. If you want to get a glimpse of mainstream libertarian thought, I suggest you read The Agitator (linked at right) every day for one month.

Well, Maggie, there is a Libertarian Party, although I would agree with you that not everyone who calls himself a libertarian necessarily agrees with the official political party, or even votes Libertarian.

The Libertarian party does not represent the vast majority of libertarians, which is why so many of us hasten to describe ourselves as “small-l libertarians”. It has been pointed out that the very concept of a “Libertarian party” automatically ensures that most who belong to it aren’t going to be true libertarians.

Nobody should injure or take from someone else without that person’s consent. More, large organizations that function like monopolies tend to aggregate power and abuse people, so they should be watched and hobbled as much as necessary.

People on the left or right can be libertarians. Most people are obsessed with telling other people what to do: hence most people are not libertarians.

Conservatives want to tell people how to lead their lives. They make moral judgments for everyone. Prostitution? NO! Sex outside marriage? NO! Even further: Miscegenation? NO! Liberals are the same. They don’t like housewives, despite the fact that many women actively want to be housewives, they’re almost Stalinist in their approach to “civil rights” – in other words, when it brushes up against one of their pet ideologies, all civil rights get thrown out the window. peoples’ group identities become more important than individual rights.

The truth is that both the left and the right want centralized control of much of our lives – but they want to do different things with it.

Libertarians want them all, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck off and leave us the hell alone.

I find the left profoundly unwise in giving a large, corruptible institution prone to making bad choices because it has to sway to fickle public opinion the power control and direct our lives on a micro-level. Not only that, it OBLIGES us to fork over our hard-earned money for what?

If we don’t feel like supporting a brutal war by the CIA in Nicaragua, tough shit: they extract the funds from us by force.

The left clings to big government because they love Kings: Instead of getting rid of the King, in fact what they want to do is take control of the throne themselves.

I say to hell with them all. They can all bite me.

I go with the elder Cato. Those Republican Romans were all vim and vigor and full of spit and moxy.

“When the king of Pergamum was visiting, Cato was disrespectful. A young man asked him why he was disrespectful. “isn’t the king of Pergamum a solid friend of Rome?”
“A Friend of Rome he may be”, said Cato, “But a King is an animal that lives on human flesh.””

I second that. I don’t care if we get to choose our kings, or if our kings claim to represent the body politic. I don’t want some corporate bigwig being King; equally, I don’t want some Community Activist being king.

The best thing we can do is create Voluntary Association: No more obligatory demands, but for the most basic of needs; Basic order (police), under tight scrutiny of the public; basic defense (again, under tight scrutiny); basic marketplace regulation (again, under tight scrutiny).

it means fie with all these budget-bashing programs. Farmers can live and die by their own means. If large corporate farms are more efficient, then be done with it and let it go. We’ re not using stone tools now, are we? Why artificially prop up grossly inefficient industries? Our carmakers can’t make a decent car? Ditch them. Let them sort it out with their creditors. BAnks? Ditto.

We doled out so much corporate welfare and individual welfare over the last 10 years for what; TOTAL SOCIAL BANKRUPTCY.

No more entitlement.

The left has turned itself into a power-hungry, blind monster chasing after delusions of justice. The right just manipulates to feather its own nest.

I come from libertarianism from the left. I’m disgusted by the lies, half-truths and delusions that infect most “progressive” politics. I know lots of libertarians who arrived from both the left and right–

and they all did so for the same reason. The left and right suffer from the same disease.

Both want to dictate to everyone else. To hell with them all.

The Romans could toss out the Kings. The biggest lesson was learned when Brutus told Tarquin the Proud to hoof it. The Romans themselves forgot their lessons almost immediately. People are stupid: They’re like mindless sheep.

“Those who trade a little liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both.”

The Founding Fathers of this country were geniuses. They knew the moment that the Masses learned that they could vote themselves goodies without paying for them, or getting others to pay for them – even later generations, in the case of debt – they would start to “right wrongs” and would destroy themselves in the process.

Ergo: Us, now.

The reason so many lefty Feminists sound like hard-core Stalinist thugs to anyone who pays attention is that they have no respect at all for individual rights. People are just tools. If a man is falsely accused of and jailed for rape, that’s fine: collateral damage in their war. Who cares? men are evil, as a category. They actually say this in almost those words. On the right, they pillory individuals in the name or moral rectitude and prissy self-righteousness.

The right attitude to have towards ANYONE who seeks to tell someone else what to do and is ready to use a club to beat them until they do it is deep suspicion and hostility.

Fuck’em.
I love the idea of charity. I don’t like the idea of charity meaning beating me up until I fork over cash under threat of jail and fines to make me give up my money. That’s not anything like justice.

“Social Justice” and “Moral Order” – the great rallying cries of tyrants, butchers and Lords in their Star Chambers.

Susan your story from Wisconsin is a myth. There is no evidence that Koch had any intention of buying those plants. It’s ridiculous that the state owns power plants, and they should get rid of them in whatever way makes them the most money.

I’d like to present to you the true master-slave relationship that Governor Walker had with Koch Brothers. Linked is a conversation that Walker is having with whom he believes is David Koch, but is actually with a prankster. It’s not hard to figure out in reading this transcript who the master is and who the slave is.

Now, if the Koch Brothers want to make and sell paper products (which is their actual business), then they have every right to. But they have no right to decide and dictate the workings of Wisconsin public institutions.

Furthermore, you made *my* point quite wonderfully with this statement: “It’s ridiculous that the state owns power plants, and they should get rid of them in whatever way makes them the most money.” Yes, that’s exactly what the Koch Brothers think, too, with the main difference being that the Kochs wanted the plants sold to them at fire-sale prices, not on your suggestion, which would be the “open-bid” method.

The inevitable effect of state-run “education” is starkly visible in this short article. I support education vouchers parents can use for any school they want, yet the educational unions are against it (gee, I wonder why?) and so are American “liberals” despite the fact that it’s a single-payer system just like they champion for health care.

The problem with vouchers is that they don’t really allow every parent to send their kids to any school (which is how it’s sold).

The situation with vouchers can be described by analogy: the local school bus is broken down. It stutters and putters along, barely, but it’s in bad shape. So a plan is drawn up to fix the school bus or, perhaps, to buy a new school bus.

But then it is suggested that the money raised (taxes, bake sales, whatever) to fix or buy the school bus should instead be spent to hire cabs to take the kids to school. This way, school bus violence will disappear, and the kids who live farther from the school don’t have to be ready an hour earlier than the kids who live closer.

But it turns out that the money that will buy a new bus will not hire cabs for every kid all year long. So a few kids get to ride to school in cabs, but the rest are stuck riding the same old school bus, which never did get fixed or replaced.

That’s a spurious argument, Sailor; if an individual voucher program didn’t work it could be fixed much more easily than a whole school system. However, teachers’ unions don’t let the programs even get started. I suggest you read this Washington Post article on the revival of the Washington, D.C. school voucher program.

If vouchers didn’t take money away from the schools most of the kids still have to attend (and most kids do still have to attend them; the Post article talks about winning scholarships), I wouldn’t have a problem. All the parents who want and can afford to have their kids ride to school in a cab should be free to do so, as long as they aren’t taking money away from the school bus most kids still have to ride.

While the description of the mother’s voice breaking with emotion appeals to my sympathies, it doesn’t tell me where the money is coming from, and the fact that they played up the emotion so much while neglecting to say where the money is coming from appeals to my suspicions.

Don’t get me started on the teachers’ unions. Public financing of elections never looks so good as when I think about them… except for when I think about the big corporate donors. A pox on both their houses, and the pox is called “public financing of elections.”

Right, so the solution to the problem is GIVE VOUCHERS TO ALL KIDS. The bad schools then lose money and go out of business (good riddance to bad rubbish), the good schools thrive and the U.S. stops being behind third-world countries in educating the young and needing to import all of our doctors and scientists from Asia.

If everyone’s so in love with a “single payer system” for healthcare, why are they so averse to it for education? Don’t you smell the rat?

OK, give vouchers to EVERY kid, and the voucher has to be enough to actually pay to send the kid to a good school. It isn’t any advantage if you can only send your kid to the same sucky school you sent him to before you had vouchers.

Heath care and education aren’t the same thing. The same sort of system might work well for both, or it might not. We know it can work in health care, because Medicare is a single-payer plan. People like to bitch about Medicare, but look at the reaction any politician who threatens the system gets from the people who use it.

The public schools are run a little more like the VA hospital system: the hospitals (schools) are government owned, the doctors (teachers) are government employees. The VA has its inefficiencies (I remember asking my mother once, “If this is the army, how do we manage to win any wars?”), but I’d guess that veterans in general (there’s always somebody) don’t want it canceled.

Exactly, and it would save money; the tuition at most private schools is LESS than the government spends per student at crappy fourth-rate public “schools”.

I’m not sure how they do it in Asia, but I do know this: the kids actually have to learn or they aren’t promoted, and the curriculum isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, either. Kids are much smarter than the American system gives them credit for.

As for the sort of voucher thing you and I seem to be converging on: I’d be all for letting some state try it THAT WAY, with perhaps a few safety features built in (we may or may not agree on what those should be). If it works, then it can be expanded. If it doesn’t, then dump it.

I found out what they do in Asia, and Finland, which comes ahead of every country except China: they pay their teachers well, and they don’t put up with bad teachers. It isn’t vouchers, getting tough, or making them attend a hundred extra days. It’s not putting up with bad teachers. Period.

Basically, you just claimed that so-called “public” institutions are in private hands: the ruling class of politicians and capitalists that buy them. So, why not join the left-libertarians that want to free those private institutions and turn them into truly public non-government institutions?

Thank you for reminding me of Who Stole Feminism?
I read it when it was still fairly new (I got it from a library!), and I absolutely loved it. It was so good to finally find a real feminist shooting down the mythology that had taken over feminism by that point.

Give the man a cigar! I would add that many of those same activist hate being women (or men, if it is one of those Robert Jensen types) and overall, dislike being human. I can be kinda* misanthropic, but it doesn’t color my politics.

*Depends on the day of the week and whether or not there’s a Cubs game that day.

They just generally hate. Actually, there’s a fair amount of Gay-bashing and weird gay-hating among some feminist circles. They’re quiet about it, but it’s real.

Hence the lack of a sense of humor. Everything is a power complex, everything is a struggle, everything is a zero-sum game.

These women must be thrilled at the number of single-mom families and the general breakdown of male America.

I was meant to be making a doc about prostitution and prohibitionists. it’s in the early planning stage.

The company considering putting up cash has to go through a 4-step legal consultation process. One of these is sending the proposal (as first conceived, ie get approval and then change whatever you want) to an official “sensitivity consultant”. Guess what that involves.

Not looking forward to that process.

They might still approve funds – but they need to know what the blowback might be. And if it’s bad – then that’s not necessarily bad. That tends to get stuff watched.

No, they’re not thrilled about single-mother families also since many of those women they would classify as “stupid sluts”.

I totally agree otherwise. There’s a lot of seething hatred held by these women. This is the same group that I’ve heard accuse transwomen of being “patriarchy spies” or some stupid shite like that. It’s “win nothing, lose everything” with this folks!

I think the real reason they hate transsexuals is that such individuals disprove “social construction of gender”. If all gender is “socially constructed”, it should be impossible for a genetic male raised to be a boy to feel as though he were female, and ditto genetic females who feel male. If socialization is so damned powerful that it can “construct” gender out of nothing, transsexuals shouldn’t be able to exist. Yet they do, and that blows the theory out of the water. Furthermore, if women are as “victimized” and “oppressed” as the neofeminists claim nobody who wasn’t born a woman should ever want to be one, and that makes male-to-female transsexuals even more of an anathema to them!

Here’s a nicely incoherent rant from a very angry but reasonable American Businessman on Youtube.

The last bits are great.

Through grotesque military adventurism, but more through absurd levels of social spending while our productive economy contracted – all that public support for spreading the wealth, for passing around other peoples’ money – we have bankrupted ourselves.

We don’t know it yet. But our old country is as dead as doornails. Gone. Done.

We can’t fix our *DEFICIT* without almost gutting all of the “entitlement” programs that the “poor” have voted themselves. The Rich voted themselves out of the picture – I’d note that almost all Democrats have more money than the Republicans, the Armchair Socialists that they are, or is it Campaign Socialists? Oh, sorry, that’s France, same deal there – and the Rich are waiting for the state to immolate itself.

It’s not military spending. All accounts show that *SOCIAL SPENDING* and entitlement benefits account for 65% of the deficit.

You think it’s bad now?

We’re finished. America is done. The single most abiding and most powerful determiner of the fate of nations is the balance book. Virtually nothing else matters compared to this.

The US is a mega-state. This mega-state is institutionally incapable of paying ongoing expenses to the tune of the total value of most of Africa *EVERY YEAR*. All of that deficit gets added to

UNPAYABLE DEBT.

When the state goes bankrupt, which almost every single level of government and every jurisdiction is well past the point of already, what do you think will happen to those nice, Left-inspired Social Justice programs?

The US debt can never be repaid. if the rest of the world is smart, they’re not going to lnd us any money any more.

I have to travel to Canada and Asia a lot. A close friend of mine in Canada was a Liberal (political party there) member of their congress for 11 years. I had dinner with him three months ago.

He said he had no idea why the American administration, on the right and left, were so married to Big Government. His party erased the deficit in 4 years left to them by a republican (?) government. People said the deficit was impossible to eliminate. These progressives eliminated it by making brutal choices.

They then LOWERED the total debt. Apparently, the guy in charge – Martin something – was considered one of the greatest financial managers in the HISTORY of the West. But what did he do?

he warned everyone else he worked with that SOCIALISTS MUST NEVER BORROW MONEY.

I just thought about that for a moment. Damnit, it made so much sense. In 4 years, he slashed, hacked and beat down opposition. His government backed him. So did a very angry and very frustrated population.

Now: Canada has one of the soundest economies on Earth. The government is terrified of deficits. They have hard numbers.

ANyone whines, any group approaches them for cash: they’re shown the door if the budget is exceeded.

You know what happened here?

Nothing. Everyone got money. Money for rape crisis centers in colleges that didn’t need them – because there are virtually no rapes there. Money for public transit that no-one uses.

Money down the toilet as *public union members* raped the government coffers getting 30% more than private sector wages for doing half the work.

Almost all government jobs could be contracted out and everyone would be better off. Virtually all studies show this.

Teachers’ unions have utterly destroyed public education in this country. Resistant to reform, obsessed with “seniority” over “quality”, obsessed to the point of irrelevancy with ideology instead of basic education, and above all else obsessed with their own salaries and benefits.

We have crippled ourselves. Canada is like Alternate America; 20 years ago, they made different choices from the same place. It hurt their people badly. Now, …

They’re *much* better off.

In Korea and China, I see the same thing. Exactly what happened to us is happening in China. It sounds hunky dory there, but the government is nearly crippled financially. Corruption from concentration of power, so almost all of the money just disappears; more than half of business decisions made by the “people’s government” are disastrous; civil rights don’t exist because the government has “the best interests of the people at heart”. “Social Justice” is their concern. Like hell.

Korea: Small. Well-managed. A government obsessed with NOT borrowing money. With breaking apart its monopolies even against corporate pressure. A public much less interested in voting themselves goodies – they just want the freedom to do what they can for themselves. Result: Much lower taxes; much lower benefits; a far more motivated population. They work like dogs becuse they have to, and they like it this way.

We are fat, lazy and stupid after 3 generations of Benefits Benefits Benefits. Why does the East beat the living shit out of us economically?

I’ve lived there. They work. We don’t. It’s actually that simple.

Canadians mixed it. They’re absurdly leftist, socialist: But they don’t believe in borrowing money to cure today’s problems without thinking of tomorrow. They do it to an extent when necessary – but they tell their own people where to go when it gets too much. “Get a job.”

I’m so humiliated whenever i go up there.

The US has been reduced to a bad joke. Our political leaders on every side are losers of the highest order. Delusional is far too complimentary for them. Criminally negligent is better.

And you know what?

People get the government they deserve. Americans like to sit back and get things they didn’t pay for. That works until Granddaddy’s chest of gold is empty.

It was empty a few years ago.

You don’t know it, but the US is facing complete and total ruin.

This is Germany in 1922. It’s over. And no Hitler can fix it for us. God help us if our mostly politically incompetent public finds themselves a Hitler or a Lenin.

I already voted with my feet. I have plans for expatriating in case it all goes south and there’s no future. Any American with options has to be thinking about this.

The rest of us are zombies, walking dead. You don’t know it. But every level of government and almost every jurisdiction is well beyond bankrupt. They can’t make basic expenses.

The only thing to do is essentially eliminate most aspects of government spending. Starting with entitlement programs, above all else. They didn’t learn that in Greece or Spain.

How does the existence of transgendered people disprove the “social construction of gender”? For most of my lifetime, the biological basis of gender was presumed to be morphology: your gender was determined by the shape of your body parts. It’s this definition of gender that seems to me fatally challenged by transgenderism, although it’s complicated by the desire of many trans individuals to acquire by medical means a morphology to match their gender identity. But it seems clear that while part of identification as transgender relates to a person’s experience of their own body, a large piece of the transgender experience is concerned with an individual’s relationship with the society around them, which supports the notion that gender is a social construction. (After all, if a person is born a woman with a penis, where would she get the idea that the proper body for a woman was one with a vagina, if not from the social construction of gender?)

I don’t think transgendered people “prove” much about human gender other than it’s a complex phenomenon with both physical and social aspects that are still little understood.

Because if gender were truly “socially constructed”, children of the same biological sex in the same family should come out the same. If little girls “learn” to be girls, then there should be no way a biological boy could feel as though her were female; he would just be programmed into the “correct” gender like everyone else. The fact that a transgender person feels in a way completely at odds with his or her social conditioning proves that there is some neurological basis of gender which is unaffected by so-called “social construction”. The only alternative explanation is that transgender people are all insane, which is what psychologists used to believe and neofeminists still believe.

As for your idea that a person has to learn the proper body parts for his sex, how do you imagine nonhuman animals understand what to do with their parts? Surely you’re not one of those people who think sex has to be taught, an that if we keep children in ignorance about it they stay asexual?

I suspect the incorrect parts don’t match such an individual’s proprioception, but anyone raised outside a Skinner box would soon learn which parts went with which. That’s not the same as saying gendered behaviors are learned.

“Social construction of gender” also ignores the fact that every other animal knows its sex role by instinct; like creationism, it’s an unscientific attempt to pretend humans are wholly different from all other animals, when we aren’t.

Saying the parts are incorrect is begging the question. If someone is born female and she has a penis, what makes the part “incorrect” except the socially constructed expectation that only males have a penis?

If gender isn’t socially constructed and it isn’t biological (as suggested by your distinction between “biological sex” and gender) what is it?

Finally, “the fact that every other animal knows its sex role by instinct” is questionable (there are animals that switch from one sex role to another in the course of their lives) and would be more relevant if sex and gender were the same thing–but I don’t think that they are.

A set of behaviors arising from neurological structure, which in normal individuals corresponds to the biological sex but in transgendered individuals does not. Really, it isn’t that difficult; you’re simply engaging in sophistry.

“Then in 1990 the “National Women’s Study” by Dean Kilpatrick announced that about 13% (one in eight) adult American women had been victims of a completed, forcible rape, a number derived in part by defining an unwanted finger being inserted into the vagina during heavy petting as “rape”.”

Im certainly no “radical” feminist, infact im a proud whore, but, i would define an unwanted finger being inserted in my vagina as rape. And im glad we try send that message to our menfolk. As i would teach that definition to my son (and daughter if i had one). Im not sure what “completed” means since, in my opinion, you stick something in my vagina that i dont consent to, its rape, and when it stops its completed. And i dont know what they mean by forcible rape, since one would assume rape is rape, no matter what kind of force is used….

And not so keen on the miscommunication or crime but not rape explanations either.

However i do agree and hate the fact that if an issue involves sex it is untouchable to questions and fact clarifying. The whole you defend rape or you defend trafficking derail technique. Its revolting.

In most American states, and indeed in my own personal usage, “rape” implies a penis (or penis analog such as a dildo, bottle or whatever) being inserted into the vagina or anus. Fingers and the like are generally classed as “sexual assault” under the laws of most American states. Furthermore, Kilpatrick counted it as rape even if the petting and diddling was completely consensual, the woman believed the finger had basically gone in accidentally or semi-accidentally and had been immediately withdrawn. Personally, I hate fingers in my vagina, but I still wouldn’t call it rape and neither did Kilpatrick’s survey respondents. The issue isn’t the definition, it’s the fact that the women’s own opinions about their experiences were ignored in favor of a label applied by an outsider who was not there; it’s only one step from calling that “rape” to calling prostitution “rape”. In any and all cases, if a rational adult woman says a sexual experience wasn’t rape then it wasn’t, period, end of story, no matter what the neofeminists want to call it.

In Australia rape is any object or body part inserted into the vagina, penis, or mouth without meaningful consent. Including asleep, too intoxicated to meaningfully consent, including as soon as consent is withdrawn. I think even in NZ it included like. um. if you agreed to sex with a condom and then they removed the condom, that’s rape, because you consented under different conditions. Obviously that’s a slippery slope and eg: he said he wasn’t married so i consented, but now i find out he is married and i didn’t consent under those circumstances.

I wonder sometimes if we don’t need another word, considering all the different ways “rape” is defined by different people! I recently had a discussion on another thread with several male readers on exactly this subject.

One of the problems with bloggers who write well is that they get full of themselves and inevitably their audience tunes out.

After a year, you haven’t done this.

I’m impressed. You have a reserve of humility in there.

Maintain that. I predict that if you manage to put some of this material together and e-publish it, you’re going to become quite well-known.

Stay humble. It gives everything you write a flavor of delicious sharpness.

The issue is that you could rightly acquire a sense of moral superity and self-righteousness, as well as condescension towards your obvious intellectual inferiors among the feminist movement. Don’t get that way.

Thanks, Gorb; I guess it helps that, unlike many people and most neofeminists, I don’t believe that intelligence is the greatest virtue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have and nice to be praised for, but it doesn’t make someone a worthwhile human being. Some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known were also among the worst excuses for souls, and some of the best, most highly-evolved souls weren’t all that bright.

As stated before: I’m a weird mix of what libertarians are always telling me they stand for and what Democrats are always telling me they stand for. This makes me, as far as I can tell, a liberal.

There are a lot of people we are supposed to believe are liberals (because somebody else said they are) who are not. There are a lot of people we are supposed to believe are conservatives (because they tell us they are) who are not. Add to this the fact that people, actual people, not statistical averages or political caricatures, seldom fit into a single box. On some issues, Maggie is to left of me. Yeah, of me. On others, she’s so far to my right I need a telescope to see her.

How can this be? Should I be to the left on everything, since I’m such a liberal I’m even willing to call myself such? Well, no, because I’m not THE LIBERAL, I’m just a liberal. I’m not utterly “pure,” and neither is Maggie. She and I agree that prostitutes should not be thrown in jail just for being prostitutes; we agree that governments should build roads and run their own damn prisons at taxpayer expense. Other things we don’t agree on.

Even Laura and I don’t agree on all social and political issues, because we are real people and not just labels. I feel that “liberal” and “conservative,” “left” and “right,” can be useful, as long as we remember that a) these are ranges, not points, that b) most people will fall outside the ranges on a few issues, and c) even that isn’t the full story. Despite what some political consultants want us to think, drinking black coffee or latte is not a left-right issue, nor is respecting the flag.

Forcible oral sex seems manifestly to be rape to me. As in, I threaten to hurt you badly unless you consent to provide oral sex, and/or be still while I perform oral sex on you. Well, “perform” and “provide” are really the wrong words here since something more like “forcibly penetrate” is meant. This happened to me when I was 11, so it was rape anyway, but if it happened right now I’d still say it was rape. Hypothetically someone says ‘I’ll pistol-whip you if you don’t do this thing.’ That’s quite straightforwardly rape, even if there’s no penis in anyone’s vagina or anus. The thing is, I was also raped not just by that person (my step-dad) but again by someone else at 17. Maybe I count for 2 in 8 now? I do have to say I know a lot of women who have been raped. A LOT. Maybe I’m just friends/family with a lot of crazy people and this is how we got that way but I have to say I don’t find the 1 in 4 statistic all that implausible when I reflect on my own life and those of the women I know.

No, you still only count for one, as do I; that’s how statistics work. Otherwise a man who was shot by 20 bullets (which does happen) would count for 20 people. I, too, know a number of women who have been raped…but I know a helluva lot more who weren’t. There’s a temptation to see our own experiences as typical, but we have to look at these things dispassionately and inflate them out of a desire to feel less unusual; for example, I’d like to believe that more than 1% of women have worked as whores, but that’s the statistic and it would be wrong of me to exaggerate it.

I couldn’t agree more, Maggie. It’s rather telling that feminists (modern ones at least) dismiss those on the receiving end of rape (btw I’m sorry to hear that you had such an experience). If anyone with a brain mentions the twofold problem of false accusation (of condemning innocent men and the cry wolf problem that puts innocent women at risk from actual rapists), they have the nerve to say “what’s so special about rape?” (no idea, why don’t you ask a rape victim) and “false accusation of rape is no worse than false accusation of car theft”. I just think that the gender feminists don’t really give a damn about actual rape victims, just riding their own agenda on the backs of other people’s misery. How utterly sick! 😦

[…] of the 1980′s claimed that one-in-four women were assaulted or raped on college campuses. As Christina Hoff Summer and Maggie McNeill pointed out, the actual rate was something like 8%. If you assume the current rate is around 3-5%, […]

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